WHITE LIKE ME

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ABSTRACT: LIFE AND LETTERS about critic Anatole Broyard… Tells about his tenure, alternating with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, as daily book reviewer for the New York “Times.”… Christopher Lehmann-Haupt did not entirely approve of Broyard's status as a fabled libertine. So when A.M. Rosenthal, the paper's managing editor, was considering hiring him, Lehmann-Haupt expressed reservations. He recalls, “Rosenthal was saying, 'Give me five reasons why not.' And I thoughtlessly blurted out, 'Well, first of all, he is the biggest ass man in town.' And Rosenthal rose up from his desk and said, 'If that were a disqualification for working at the New York Times'–and he waved–'this place would be empty!'” Mentions his controversial review of James Baldwin's piously sentimental novel of black suffering, “If Beale Street Could Talk.” Broyard wrote: “If I have to read one more description of the garbage piled up in the streets of Harlem, I may just throw protocol to the winds and ask whose garbage is it? I would like to remind Mr. Baldwin that the City Health Code stipulates that garbage must be put out in proper containers, not indiscriminately 'piled.'”… Ellen Schwamm recalls that one of the houses Broyard had in Connecticut had a black jockey on the lawn, and that “He used to tell me that Jimmy Baldwin had said to him, 'I can't come and see you with this crap on your lawn.'” Brent Staples, who is black, was an editor at the “Book Review” at the time Broyard was there. “Anatole hat it both ways,” Staples says. “He would give you a kind of burlesque wink that seemed to indicate he was ready to accept the fact of your knowing that he was a black person. It was a real ambiguity, tacit and sort of recessed. He jived around and played with it a lot, but never made it express the fact that he was black.” It was a game that tried Staples' patience…. “Here was a guy who was, for a long period of time, probably one of the two or three most important critical voices on literature in the United States. How could you, actively or passively, have this fact hidden?” Staples pauses, then says, “You know, he turned it into a joke. And when you change something basic about yourself into a joke, it spreads, it metastasizes, and so his whole presentation of self became completely ironic. Everything about him was ironic.”.. Describes his death from testicular cancer. . .